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TinPinW
=P in W with T= by pyrrho of oakland To Contemplate I shall inquire into the phenomenon of agency as experienced by the agent, and offer names to some concepts involved, while speaking about these things skeptically. The question of agency is such that I may rephrase the question as a question about thinking, what the agent appears to do, in such a way as to not prosuppose the agent does thinking rather than merely exist as a phenomenon, of thinking. The way of thinking I call T. Additionally, lets posit there appears to be a person P, in a domain W. P is a generalization analagous to the way of thinking but conceptually including more than T, P is something within T. W is all that P exist within, and is analagous to whatever T exists within, but extended somehow. We identify those things that influence T as its input. In W these are a conceptually extended set which includes those things that are unknown, and perhaps even the unknowable#. Of this set T can only access a subset which are “things that can be thought about”. Such things can be called “perceptions”. The way of thinking, being a process, is taken also to produce an output. With respect to W this output could be of any kind, that is, of unknown and possibly uknowable kind, but with respect to T, the output which can be thought about this output must be percieved. That is, to be thought about, the result of a thinking process, say, picking up and eating a piece of fruit as a result of seeing the fruit, must be perceived, and the output which is relevant to T is that about which something was observed. The way of thinking T for a given period of time is thus whatever connects the input perceptions, and the output perceptions which are percieved by a subsequent thinking process. The system attempts to introduce as few assumptions as possible and instead to invent terms that interact with the subject matter rather than force it into a mold. Thus, I do not say P is the agent, but merely that it is related to agency. I do assume T is reactive to something, and I call this something i. And I do assume T is productive of something, and call this o. The concept of T is thus sometimes represented as iTo, and the distinction between i and o is relative, with i being prior in time in some cases, and prior in reason in other cases, and in the ideal case, prior in both time and reason. When considering thinking, I limit myself to those things available to T, things that can be thought about, which to me means “things which can be percieved”. “Can things that cannot be perceived, be thought about?” is not an emperical question in my system, because if a thing can be thought about, then whatever it’s entry point into the thinking process, that is called “perception of the thing”, and the thing itself is a called an image in some perception-space, i.e. a perception. I do not suppose to know what perception is mechanically, but rather to identify that images become available to the thinking process at some moments in time, and to name this particular event, be it modeled as a transaction or in any other way. The perceptual nature of o is not clear when we think of output states general abstraction, for example, the output of an element such as P in W. That is, via a standard materialism one contemplates results of unknown processes which produce P in W as its output. This output is conceptually attributed with extancy#, but it is not necessarily available as information, which is to say, there is not necessarily information available about it. T can only operate on information. The implicit presumptions of iTo involve interpretting ways of thinking in terms of information theory, processed in an embodied environment which is bound in time and space. If T has a material corespondent is an interesting question, and can be expressed as a comparison between o and W. But anything we think about that comparison, that is, that we think is part of W, is part of a conception, part of o which consist of perceptions, produced by some way of thinking Tw, and are thus comparing o which model iTo with o that model W, that is, we are still limited to actually perceived, directly extant perceptions of. That is, it is clear early in contemplation that we cannot consider W as itself, but must consider what we think about W, which will be o. If T perceives P breaking a wine glass, it is the perception of this result that allows it to be thought of. Further, perception of “breaking a wine glass”, will be a perception that is o of some T, Te, which took as input some more raw information, such as visual input of the P contacting the glass, of it falling, breaking, and so forth (e.g. the coincident and collocated sound of it breaking), which then output a more gestalt perception “of the wine glass, a thing, undergoing a transformation, breaking”. Indeed, the gestalt of P as a “thing” is really the o of some thinking process, TI, which took as input visual and other imagery of the what we call the self, a complex bundle of colocated and coincident perceptions, which output a gestalt perception of P. If Tn perceives a previous T, such as Tj, as having resulted in the broken wine glass (perhaps Tj was the thinking process during a glass juggling incident), then again that can only be thought of because T has perception “of T”, which by that the perceptive process has taken the result of T and transformed it to an perception, which is by definition an input. This means the output of T which can be thought about, probably a subset of the “results of T in W”, are perceptions, and thus that what is produced by T are perception. Thus the distinction between i and o is a relative one, and works to draw the relation, T, as that which transforms one perception, i, into another, o. The perceptions of i are those which are prior to o in reason (that is, o depend on i logically), and in time (that is, i are experienced prior to o chronologically). The presumption in T is that there is a transformation from i and o in principle, rather than a random series of states which merely seems to undergo transformation via apopheniaic projection. In general, the hope is that these terms enable a pattern-finding analysis, which makes as few assumptions as possible, analagously to the way mathematics makes as few assumptions as possible about the domain to which it is applies, limiting itself to validity in proportion to how well numbers can be assigned to explain the domain of application. What has the mind to think of? The overt statement of iTo is that if the mind is the thing doing the thinking, at least rhetorically, without prejudice to the fact that “doing” may be a sort of experience that terms out to be unintentionally or unwilled, which happens of necessity in all senses, is that the mind considers i. But what is left out is the nature of i. I have called it a set, so considy individual perceptions p as members of i, then what is the character of these perceptions, p? That is, what is the medium on which they are drawn? How do I experience individual perceptions,given that there are very distinct sorts of impression and also apparently closely related perceptions which are unique but share some qualities, such as their medium. To build a robust abstraction that can handle the diversity both in kind and unique incidence of perceptions we can begin with a simple demonstration of the heterogeneity of perception, drawn from sense perception. Sense perception is a core member of the category of perception. There are five classical types of sense perception if divided by the basic medium of each of the classical senses, which are broken down to relate to our material model of sensation, that is, sense spaces which relate to what appear to be materially extant sense organs in the P, iow, in the body. These five epitomies of perception are also those considered most directly connected to material reality, to facts that matter. Within iTo a fact# is any persistent perception, but a material fact will probably be limited to a subset of perceptual spaces which lend themselves to consistency checks of various sorts, such as coincidence and colocation. Sight and Sound To abstract this concept of perceptual space, consider sight and hearing as representative of the classical senses. These types of experience are both very familiar and vivid to those fortunate enough to possess unimpaired sight and hearing, but they are also orthogonal#. While each seems to use a three dimensional space as a medium, the paint which goes on that canvas, visual vs auditory images do not interact with one another. Making something higher pitched, in other words, will not change the color palette of it. The examples of visual and audible senses show there is a possibility of correlating these two spaces since they both have a concept of space built in. Space and time, I will show are the major factors in bundling i in coherent sets by a material methodology, and producing relatively more gestalt perceptions of whole things in o than were percieved in i. Other senses, such as smell and touch, while classic, which still core members of “perceptual spaces”, also have spacial aspects, but they are harder to correlate to the space abstractions in sight and sound. It is clear, while this correlation can be done, that it is not automatic, and that each sense medium, in addition to the perceptual-pigment, has its own projection of space, and these are cross-correlated for colocation by mappings which are constructed sense by sense. This leaves the sense of time as the most common thing, and thus the most reliable sorting criteria for bundling i and o as coincidence. In general this leaves us with no special role in principle for coincidence and colocation as analysis criteria, that is, it is one of any number of relational principles. However, it has been greatly pursued bioevolutionarilly, and works very well at the levels of sophistication we have evolved. Abstracting this I see there is a visual sense-space, consisting of visual pigments and a visual sense of space, which is distinct from an auditory sense-space, with auditory pigments and an auditory sense of space. I take it as similar for the other sense-spaces. Further, I admit that we can perceive in these spaces without direct aid of the sense organs, such as in our dreams. The abstraction from this realization requires I posit perception-spaces, so that the sense organs not be involved in their use, at least directly. From this abstraction I extend sense-spaces to other streams of perception that may require their own classification, for either practical or fundamental reasons. For example, I posit a perception-space for hunger, in which images of hunger are visualized metaphorically as compositions in the hunger perception-space, with a hunger-pigment, the (at least somewhat) familiar feeling of hunger, and some spacial component. The spacial component of hunger is an interesting and much unexplored concept, perhaps it is a mapping to parts of the digestive system, and can be felts as a hunger feeling in the mouth, stomach, or gut. A feeling of intense hunger, as in the case of starvation, is a composition in this space, and the the metric-space, which I have also called the space-component as distinct from the pigment acts as a canvas upon which various expressions of the type supported by that perception-space. Perhaps you will prefer, as I do, to think of a perception-space such as hunger as a sense-space as well, carrying the abstraction back to the sense-organs, and to consider whatever mechanism by which our body learns it thinks it is short of nutrients as “sense organ” of some sort, albeit possibly complex, indirect, more representational, and less literal. I feel justified in this extension of perceptions like hunger (also lust, fear, etc) to the status as types of senses insofar as these have been found to be connected to material reality by some means. Within iTo in general, however, we can also consider those sense-spaces too indirectly connected to categorize as “sense” perceptions. A sense of fear, or dread, feelings of paranoia, etc all these have their own perception-spaces non-controversially, but if we doubt the material justification for the perceptive stream, it may be more practical to indicate so by not granting reality as a “sense-space”. Perceptions of fear are among those most notoriously famous for producing persistent perceptual streams without legitimately sufficient material basis. Such consideration do play a role dependent on the context in which iTo is applies. Real Time Thinking and iTo Use of iTo is supposed to be as non-presumptive as possible, and does not make assumptions about the material nature of time, as iTo avoids ontological commitments about materialism, and starts instead with a solipsitically-valid set of prior circumstances. However, in as much as something we might call time is a part of the experience of the agent, so called, and a part of the thinking experience it is to be taken into account. Within the formalization iTo provides an implicit analog to the influence of time through it’s presumption of a sequentialist element, that is, i precedes o. That i precedes o is time in the iTo model, and in a sense this transformation of i into o may merely be the effect of time. That is, if we were to follow willless determinism and express it in iTo, then the so called will is nothing but the passing of time, that is, T is not willfull “thinking” but merely the natural evolution over time of perceptions. Three Time Lines Figure The formalism, according to the preceding section, thus includes a minimalist concept of time which involves perceptions being prior and after other perceptions. However, my experiences of the thinking process involve aspects of time which go beyond this minimalist assumption, and I will look at these in order to try to understand what sorts of patterns my formalism may tend to impose. That is, what sort of deviations from my whole experience will this limited formalism tend to introduce, and thus under what conditions might it be more ore less apt? The main issue is that I experience my way of thinking as continuous, with individual bits of perception streaming in, and not as a set prepared for the thinking process. The figure below shows three models with time progressing in the downward direction and perceptions associated with moments in time. From left to right each progresses from first assumptions taken as implicit in the iTo formalism, to more apt descriptions of our experiences, which then can be related to iTo to have a better understanding of what iTo represents from the more full process. =Time Line One = The characterization of i as input and o as output maps naturally to a time line diagram with i shown coming into T’s time line, and o exiting later. The symbol T in iTo, in this case would be a segment of the T-line between i and o. =Time Line Two = However, as mentioned above, we can only think about something if it is percieved, or input, into T. All the results of T may not, and in most models of reality will not, be perceived by the thinking process. Thus in line 2 we draw o as subsequent to i but as also coming into the thinking process with an inward arrow, as does i. T is still naturally a simple segment between the two, but possibly exclusive of o, which begins to possibly be the start of a subsequent way of thinking. Time Line Three In time line three we admit that we have series of sets of perceptions, of both i and o, and these are interleaved. The sets i we want to consider as such for a human sized “way of thinking”, such as a religion, a type of analysis, or a given emotive pattern, consist of many of these subets, and similarly with o. Futhermore, we may immediately perceive a judgement about which of these are i and which o, we do not know, and sometimes must revise what we think were “raw input” and which were results of thinking we falsely considered input to the thinking process (circular thinking). Of course, all o and percieved by a subsequent T and are i from that percespective. Apt Domains for iTo Thus the to answer the question, “in what domains is iTo liable to be an apt analytic approach” we have to answer in what cases does essentially rearranging the perceptions into distinct sets and attributing a common transformation has taken the i superset and produced the o superset lead to any sort of apt analysis. Clearly, a thinking process heavilly dependent on the order of perceptions will not be aptly abstracted, at least not unless we choose neurologically small concepts for T, which contradicts the intension to address agency, and ways of thinking that are perceptible. We may address some aspect of thinking about such activities, but it’s not clear a system such as that wants to rely on the distinction between i and o in that case because in real time there is not time to accurately sort them with analysis (though some other mental faculty might enable it). The situations where such sorting is apt are those which are deliberative, and those which undergo many iterations, so that the sorting can be done and redone. These are such as the major question of philosophy where we address the question “what lead me to that conclusion”, and are thus asking which i lead to the state I currently observe. The symbol o is best thought of the observed, rather than the output., though specifically what is observed about the self, and i is what is observed about things other than the self, and both are “perceptions”. The entity T is the sum total of all the partial thinking processes, since the way of thinking is itself affected by perception, and the human mind seems to have distinct ways of thinking which shift based on perception, such as flight or fight behavior arising when perceptions are interpreted as theatening, T is a integral over all these partial transformations, and the more when an i was recieved affects the characterization of T, the less apt iTo will be as an analysis tool, with the possible remedy to reducing the scope of time, and the natural difficulty being we are constrained to perceptible time, which means on the scale of tenths of seconds, one might persume in lieu of better emperical data if thought involves “reactive” time. Certainly no more than hundredths of second even if thought includes the first, practcally unconscious processing of raw perceptive input in the case of sense perception.